Bjorn Lomborg

Finally, a vestigial government-funded program actually worth cutting gets taken out as Denmark's new regime change is opting to excise Bjorn Lomborg's $1.6 million in funding for his Copenhagen Consensus Center.

“It’s been very strange that particular researchers have received special treatment due to ideology. We’re going to run fiscal policy differently,” said Ida Auken from the Socialist People's Party.

Lomborg is notorious for touting economic woes pertaining to the costs of mitigating climate change. He has often suggested that it is either too expensive to tax carbon and cap emissions to solve climate change, except when he was advocating his 1900 robotic ship army idea to spray sea water and ameliorate warming through geoengineering.

Either way, the almighty free market that laissez-faire economists pray to has spoken (Lomborg's movie 'Cool It' raked in all of $62,713 in box office sales), and it's out with excessive climate-denier-mobiles. It's like the irony is killing…off his program. Literally.

However, oddly, Shermer still isn’t really worried about global warming. He falls into roughly the same camp as Bjorn Lomborg, arguing that it isn’t likely to be a big deal and will be something we can manage. Here is Shermer’s summary of Lomborg’s answers (in the film Cool It) to two key questions that one must confront if one accepts global warming is happening and caused by humans.

Q: How much warmer is it going to get?

A: Probably a little, very unlikely a lot.

Q: What are the consequences of a warmer climate?

A: Debatable depending on how much warmer it will get, but very likely the consequences will be minor.

Now, this baffles me. I don’t understand how anyone could be so confident warming would be on the low end of the projections, and not that big a deal.

When I had Shermer on the show, it was not my goal to debate him about global warming…

Now he is championing the dangerous prospect of geo-engineering as his latest reason to ignore ballooning carbon emissions. Specifically he believes a fleet of 1,900 robotic ships patrolling the Pacific Ocean churning seawater into the upper atmosphere will negate the need to do anything about climate change.

Problem solved!

This loopy prospect emerged from the Copenhagen Consensus - Lomborg’s personal climate conference where hand-picked attendees parrot his fringe notion that climate change is simply to expensive to deal with. Real economists around the world have come to exactly the opposite conclusion.

And now Lomborg finds himself at odds with actual experts yet again. The same week he was courting press attention for his robot ship solution, a gathering of independent scientists was warning the world about the dangers of relying on geo-engineering instead of emission cuts.

“Playing with the Earth’s climate is a dangerous game with unclear rules,” said Robert Jackson, director of Duke University’s Center on Global Change and organizer of a symposium on geo-engineering at theEcological Society of America’s Annual Meeting.

Lets get stared on pulling apart this polemic and the laundry list of errors and misinformation.

Lomborg starts by calling into question the link between tropical cyclones and climate change. The doubting Dane intones:

“It is simply wrong to say that storms are growing stronger every hurricane season… hurricanes across the world for the past year have been about as inactive as at any time since records began to be kept.”

For the uninitiated, this event is where a group of right wing economists, hand picked by Bjorn Lomborg, paid for by the conference organized by Bjorn Lomborg, will rank a laundry list of the Earth’s ills based on an arbitrary budget and timeline.

Global warming is an environmental problem, not a political one. And people who try to ‘solve’ it with political or public relations spin are just making the problem worse,” said James Hoggan, co-founder of the DeSmogBlog.

Here's a review out this weekend in Canada's Globe and Mail on Bjorn Lomborg's new book, Cool it.

Choice quote:

I remember wondering, after I interviewed Lomborg, whether he was intellectually dishonest or just not very bright. Cool It has convinced me that it doesn't matter. Lomborg has now proved beyond a doubt that he is incapable of contributing anything of merit to scientific discourse.”

It seems there may be a bit of last minute damage control over at the Bjorn Lomborg camp.

A heavy piece of the marketing campaign for Lomborg's new book Cool It was the author's claim that polar bear populations are increasing. Lomborg uses this as evidence of his argument the consequences of global warming are more hype than reality.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.